Remove "System" Designation from Disk 2

When I initially installed Win7, like a good boy, I unplugged all drives but my SSD. After installing, I plugged in my other drives. And life was wonderful.

A week ago, I wanted to send a Win7-formatted SSD to a friend of mine. So I got the SSD, unplugged my SSD, plugged his in, and installed. I forgot to unplug my other drives.

After many System Repairs, I finally have the system working again, but I can't for the life of me assign my C drive as System, Active, Primary Partition. The closest I can get is Active and Primary Partition. Check out my pic:



I've used diskpart, tried EasyBCD, tried everything. If I unplug all my other drives and boot with just my SSD, then in Disk Management, everything looks as it should -- the C partition is also labeled as System. But if I hook up the other drives, the System designation goes to my E drive.

How can I right this wrong? I know I can format the E drive, but there's like 600GB of data on there and I'd rather not do that if I can help it.

1) Boot the Repair disk.

2) Mark the System Reserved partition on Disk 0 ACTIVE (in your screenshot Disk 1)
Partition - Mark as Active

3) Mark the Disk 1 INACTIVE (in your screenshot Disk 2)
Partition - Mark as Inactive

The Disk 0 in your screenshot is UNKNOWN.

Disk 0 is a 320GB IDE drive. I absolutely don't want anything remotely related to booting on that drive.

I'll give this a shot and see what happens -- thanks for the tip!

whs said:

Looks like the bootmgr ended up on E when you installed the system for your friend. I wonder whether that system is working without the E partition.

No, it's not -- he had to reinstall. I was trying to save him some trouble, and ended up making myself a whole lot of it!

sjwoo said:

Disk 0 is a 320GB IDE drive. I absolutely don't want anything remotely related to booting on that drive.

I'll give this a shot and see what happens -- thanks for the tip!

Make sure the IDE Drive is INACTIVE.

If E interferes even after marking it Inactive, unplug it during Startup Repair - Run up to 3 Separate Times to C after Marking System Reserved Partition Active.

All other HD's should always be unplugged during both installs and startup repairs to avoid having the System flag derailed. The Active flag should also only be on the partition intended to boot the System.